If you want to lose weight you'll see results faster if you eschew fancy and complicated dietary rules and focus on reducing the number of calories you take in—though we might suggest not measuring them out in Twinkies.

Invariably anytime weight loss is the topic of conversation somebody chimes in with the time-honored advice of "eat less" and others counter with explanations of how it's vastly more complicated than that. While optimal nutrition intake and overall wellbeing are more complicated than simply cutting calories Mark Haub, a nutrition professor at Kansas State University, makes a compelling case for the power of calorie cutting. To prove his point, that the most important element of weight loss was raw calories cutting, he went on an odd-ball diet of primarily junk food mixed with a daily protein shake and a multi-vitamin. In 10 weeks he lost 27 pounds by shifting his daily caloric intake from 2,600 calories per day to 1,800 or under.

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The most puzzling part of the experiment, one for which he has no concrete answer at the moment, is that he didn't just lose weight he also increased the "good" forms of cholesterol in his blood and decreased the "bad" forms despite eating box after box of Twinkies and other junk food. Regardless of the anomalies of his research the evidence stacks strongly in favor of calorie reduction as the gold standard of dieting.

For some great resources to help you count and cut calories make sure to check out the Hive Five on Best Weight Management Tools. All of the contenders in the weight management tools Hive feature some sort of calorie identification and tracking tools.